Colin Coleman

Senior Fellow Atlantic Council

Colin Coleman is a South African banker, academic and thought leader, based in Johannesburg. He is widely recognised as an influential voice on national and African affairs, and has played a key role in events affecting South Africa and the continent. Colin is the Co-Chairman of the Youth Employment Service (YES), which since 2018, has provided over 207,000 youth with one year paid internships across close to 2,000 companies, in partnership with the South African Government. In 2024, Colin was appointed a non-resident Senior Fellow with the Atlantic Council. As of December 2024, Colin was appointed a member of the Board of Advisors for Mercury Public Affairs, LLC. He is on the Board of The Foschini Group, a listed company on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. A former partner of Goldman Sachs, he was Chief Executive Officer, Sub Saharan Africa, Goldman Sachs up until his retirement end 2019. He was head of the Goldman Sachs South Africa office from 2000. In 2008, he was named head of the Investment Banking Division for Sub-Saharan Africa, named managing director in 2002, and a Partner in 2010. Colin is an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School in New York, where in 2024 he taught a course "Doing business in Africa, the next Frontier of Global growth”. He will next teach the course in the Fall, 2026. He was previously a Distinguished Fellow with Insead, and, in 2020, a Senior Fellow and Lecturer at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Colin served on the Steering Committee of the CEO Initiative, and on the boards of both the National Business Initiative and Business Leadership South Africa.  In the past, Colin served as a Senior Advisor to the political risk consultancy, Eurasia. He also has served on the board of Kyosk, an African consumer technology company, and on the advisory board of AriseIIP. Colin consults to a number of companies. In the 1980's Colin was an anti-apartheid activist, and from 1989 deeply involved in South Africa’s constitutional transition from apartheid to democracy. He served in working groups of the multi-party talks, facilitated the International Mediation Forum and helped to negotiate the agreement to facilitate all parties’ participation in South Africa’s 1994 elections. Colin was named one of the World Economic Forum’s "Global Leaders for Tomorrow". He was a recipient of Harvard Business School’s “Business Statesman Award”, on behalf of the Consultative Business Movement, and was named one of Euromoney's World Top Ten “Financing leaders for the 21st Century."